ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Scaling laws governing stochastic growth and division of single bacterial cells.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 104 papers.
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Who cites it
104 citing papers in PubMed.
- Harnessing microfluidics for microbiology: from bacteria-host interactions to emerging cancer therapies.Communications biology · 2026Review
- Bacterial growth rate in populations and single cells.Nature microbiology · 2026Review
- Gillespie-based simulation and inference for non-Markovian stochastic reaction networks.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Impact of variability in cell generation times on cell-to-cell variability of protein concentrations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cell Population Dynamics Informed by Cell-Cycle Regulation: A Deterministic Modeling Toolkit.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Review
- Article
- Principles of protein abundance regulation across single cells in a mammalian tissue.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Nonlinear memory in cell-division dynamics across species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dissecting the physics of bacterial biofilms with agent-based simulations.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2025Article
- Cyclo-stationary distributions of mRNA and Protein counts for random cell division times.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A generalized adder for cell size homeostasis: Effects on stochastic clonal proliferation.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Cell size and selection for stress-induced cell fusion in unicellular eukaryotes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Metabolic rearrangement enables adaptation of microbial growth rate to temperature shifts.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Parents-child multiple sites of microbial and metabolic signatures in autism spectrum disorder.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Single-cell imaging of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis cell cycle reveals linear and heterogenous growth.Nature microbiology · 2024Article
- Coupling of cell growth modulation to asymmetric division and cell cycle regulation inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A GeneralizedbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Differential growth regulates asymmetric size partitioning inLife science alliance · 2024Article
- A comprehensive review of computational cell cycle models in guiding cancer treatment strategies.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Review
- Scaling of stochastic growth and division dynamics: A comparative study of individual rod-shaped cells in the Mother Machine and SChemostat platforms.Molecular biology of the cell · 2024Article
44 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Uncovering the quantitative laws that govern the growth and division of single cells remains a major challenge. Using a unique combination of technologies that yields unprecedented statistical precision, we find that the sizes of individual Caulobacter crescentus cells increase exponentially in time. We also establish that they divide upon reaching a critical multiple (≈ 1.8) of their initial sizes, rather than an absolute size. We show that when the temperature is varied, the growth and division timescales scale proportionally with each other over the physiological temperature range. Strikingly, the cell-size and division-time distributions can both be rescaled by their mean values such that the condition-specific distributions collapse to universal curves. We account for these observations with a minimal stochastic model that is based on an autocatalytic cycle. It predicts the scalings, as well as specific functional forms for the universal curves. Our experimental and theoretical analysis reveals a simple physical principle governing these complex biological processes: a single temperature-dependent scale of cellular time governs the stochastic dynamics of growth and division in balanced growth conditions.
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